Seattle do nicely

Sure I’m not the first person to come up with that pun. In fact, Mark probably has the same pun on his blog…ah, no, he doesn’t, but I’m sure he will come up with a better one soon.

Anyway, I believe in my last post I predicted that I would be ranting about how cool Seattle is, and cool it most certainly is. I most definitely had the best time since my own wedding and honeymoon six months previously. Marvellous city, marvellous company, marvellous weather, marvellous wedding, marvellously silly stag night. Even, to my unexpected joy, a good local ale (Red Hook ESB).

There are only two problems. The first is that I discovered as a teenager when trying to write a diary that I’m actually not very good at writing about positive experiences I’ve had, I write much more expressively and passionately when I’m pissed off about something. When I’m upbeat and chirpy about something, it normally sounds annoyingly twee and I feel a bit embarrassed. So let’s just say that Seattle was damn fine. Which reminds me, we also hired a car for the day and drove out the short distance to Snoqualmie and North Bend, which is where parts of Twin Peaks were filmed, and that was marvellous as well. And we had some damn fine black coffee and some cherry pie.

The second problem is that I got ill on the flight home, still haven’t recovered and have been feeling rather physically rubbish since. And rather emotionally rubbish into the bargain, but I won’t bore you with the details.

Fortunately, a fillip is at hand as on Thursday I’m hitting the skies yet again, this time for a weekend in Turkey for Eldan and Mel’s post-wedding party, hosted by Eldan’s parents. Only for a couple of days, admittedly, but should be marvellous. It’s a bit luxurious of me, I know, but after the way I’ve felt since the plane on the way home, I need another holiday already.

Oh yes, before I forget, and just to prove that I’m better at writing about grumpy things: Delta are a useless shower of expletives and flying with them (all 20 odd hours in each direction) was a particularly rubbish and disappointing experience, even by the low standards I had been expecting of most American airlines. It wasn’t that they did anything so bad, but quite frankly they made AirZena, the hapless Georgian national airline, look like a top-notch operation. [Going off on a tangent, once when I was flying home from Georgia, they showed a very badly made safety video on a dodgy video player that kept either speeding up or slowing down to absurd speeds – which did very little to make you feel safe]. Delta’s misdemeanours included: on a 10-hr flight, allowing all the sound to break and doing nothing to fix it, meaning that we couldn’t watch any videos; not giving out any free booze whatsoever; charging you for headphones; charging us $25 for being 0.8 kg overweight on one bag even though we were well within our overall allowance, because apparently the allowance is per bag rather than per person; having some of the shabbiest looking planes I’ve ever seen; having a stewardess who talks at length to the person next to you while ignoring you entirely; being in any way associated with JFK Terminal 3, which is so rundown it looks like some 60s brown-brick bus station on the outskirts of Bolton; having ‘helpful’ ground staff who either were entirely absent or didn’t want to answer your questions; on another flight, their video player mangling the one film I might have wanted to watch (Cuba Libre) and having to show something else instead; having a very incompetent check-in in Seattle so that it took well over an hour to even get to the desk, even though there were only about 20-30 people in the queue; and last but not least (though maybe this isn’t their fault) – putting me down for extra security in Seattle airport, which meant that I had a ‘jovial’ conversation with the US Department of Security while they packed and unpacked my hand luggage, I virtually missed the plane and did not get a chance to say goodbye properly to Eldan, Mel, Sam and Mark, who were leaving on a different flight the same morning.